LONDON—How do you compete with 15,000 Chinese performers? This city turned 70,800 people into pixels.
On Friday night, London sought to distinguish itself from Beijing's 2008 spectacular by joining spectators and technology into an unusual team for the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics: the human Jumbotron.
The pixel show included such images as a 60s go-go dancer and a train in London's Underground. During a dance segment, people jiggled their pixel panels to create a mass twinkling effect.Organizers of this £27 million production, about $42 million, equipped each member of the audience with a black 10-inch paddle, dotted with nine light-up LCD squares and wired into a central computer. Packed around the oval stadium, the pixel people formed what's likely the world's largest video screen and almost certainly its first cyborg version.
The human pixels included Queen Elizabeth and first lady Michelle Obama. "We wanted the people in the audience to feel truly part of the experience," said Danny Boyle, the show's Oscar-winning director.Behind the scenes, organizers had to reinvent screen technology to align the blinking paddles into the video spectacle, while computer artists endured months of trial and error with the stadium's odd geometry.
"Television is a bully, it just pushes its way forward and gets its own way," he said. "So we tried to make it as interactive as possible."
Given the expense, he added, "it's a good job they work."
Opening ceremonies of the Olympics are locked in an arms race of pomp and circumstance. The challenge for London was, "What's going to be the 'wow factor,'" said Michael Payne, the former marketing director of the International Olympic Committee and chairman of the international division of Crystal CG, a Beijing-based company that made the people-pixel graphics.
The hardware started to come together after a 2010 meeting between the London Organizing Committee and Lititz, Penn.-based company Tait Technology, which specializes in building concert tour sets. Frederic Opsomer, Tait's chief executive, told organizers he could put a screen anywhere, including three-dimensional surfaces.
Late last year, the opening ceremony team, led by Boyle, asked about turning the audience into the screen.
"Dream it and we will make it happen," said Opsomer.
For spectators in the arena—and the TV cameras broadcasting the Opening Ceremony around the world—the crowd melted into giant displays Friday, roughly the equivalent of five HD-TVs arranged in a circle.
Workers installed hundreds of miles of wiring along and behind stadium seats to connect the pixel paddles, which were tucked into holsters on the back of each seat. Going wireless risked security and production troubles: People might toss them onto the field or the wireless signal might fail. "During an Opening Ceremony, you don't want to take any chances," said Opsomer.
The paddles had the same type of LCD lights as a regular TV and were waterproof, a requirement for London's soggy Olympic Games.
A brigade of technicians stood by with several hundred extra paddles to replace any that burned out.
Organizers debated over how big a role to give the audience: Should the images be static? Or should people move them around? An artistic team weighed the value of a regular image versus one with a more organic feel, said Opsomer.
As part of the preshow, the audience leader, or "head mechanical," walked through a series of pixel paddle moves, including circles and a flick-of-the-wrist action called the shimmer. "Let's do circles to the right, circles like so," she said. "London, working together!"
The 1984 Los Angeles Games had an analog version. Spectators at that opening ceremony held up a colored piece of plastic under their noses to create an image that, from a distance, looked like a map of the world. Using a photo of the stadium, a graphic artist colored the flags onto the seats, and then used a computer to translate those designs into pixel assignments, said Ric Birch, who helped produce opening ceremonies In Los Angeles and other cities.
In the 1992 opening ceremony, Birch and his colleagues handed out glow sticks to the audience and some started throwing them onto the field. He didn't mind. "I kind of like the randomness and riskiness of relying on the audience and knowing that they will do their own thing," he said.
There was less risk of misbehavior with London's digital extravaganza. Creating the images was the challenge and London got help from Crystal CG, which also created digital images for Beijing's opening ceremony.
At a secret office in central London, equipped with extra air conditioners to cool computer processors, 50 Crystal animators, designers and engineers have since December worked to make images that would fit the slope of the stadium and not overwhelm spectators.
"You put a bouncing ball in there and it is terrifying," said Will Case, the creative director on the project.
"The old days of just holding up a lighter are gone," said Crystal CG's project director Ed Cookson..
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Edited By Cen Fox Post Team
